Life After Investment Banking… (A letter from my 23 year old self)
Stephen Ridley. Performing live.
(Written when I was 23 and posted on a community website for those in the investment banking space)
Like a majority of people who are on this website, I used to come on here and write bullshit about a life partly my own, partly fantasy. I'm now going to uncloak the anonymous man and tell you my story.
My name is Stephen Ridley. I graduated from a top-tier British University with a First Class Honours Degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics in 2010 and went straight into a top-tier European Investment Bank, after interning there in 2009. I worked in the top team (on a revenue basis) for 16 months, before quitting in October 2011.
I want to tell you about that experience, and about what has happened since then, about how I left the green to chase my dream. This will be blunt and honest. I do not mean to offend, quite the opposite, I hope to inspire! Again, this isn't an attack on those who choose to be bankers, it's just me sharing my experience with the lessons I've learnt, and hopefully, it speaks to a few people. This is a picture of what I do now. It's a little different from where I was 6 months ago!
Banking is fucking brutal
I knew this after my internship, but I didn't care. I wanted money. I wanted respect. I wanted to be a somebody in the eyes of myself and others. But most of all, I wanted money. Why? Because money is freedom. Money means I can wear what I want, live where I want, go where I want, eat what I want, be who I want. Money would make me happy. Right? Well... not exactly I'm afraid. In fact, money didn't seem to make any of the bankers happy. Not one person in the roughly 200 I got to know in banking was happy. Yet all earned multiples of the national average salary.
The reality of banking is this. Like everyone there, I worked my ass to the bone, working mind-numbingly boring work. My life consisted of emails, Excel, PowerPoint, meetings, endless drafts and markups about shit I couldn't give less of a fuck about, edits, drafts, edits, drafts, edits, send to printers, pick up, courier, meetings, more work, multitasking, boredom, boredom, tired, boredom, avoiding the staffer on a Friday, more work, depression, tired, tired, tired, fucking miserable. 15-hour days were a minimum, 16-17 were normal, 20+ were frequent, and once or twice a month there would be the dreaded all-nighter.
I worked around 2 out of every 4 weekends in some form. I was never free, I always had my Blackberry with me, and thus I could never truly detach myself from the job. These are the objective facts, contrary to what any 'baller' wants to tell you. The only models were Excel models, and the only bottles were Coca-Cola, which I drank a lot of to stay awake.
Though I managed to maintain relationships with certain friends (a testament to how good these friends were), I never was really 'there' and never really relaxed to enjoy their company, I was either preoccupied, exhausted, or too self-centered to really have a 2-way conversation. I was constantly tired, and constantly stressed, and I had this constant reoccurring thought.
The thought went like this. I'm not happy. These are my golden years, my 20s, the years I want to look back on and talk about with fondness and pride. I should be making interesting stories, having the time of my life whilst I have no dependents. I'm richer than I've ever been, yet I'm not as happy as I was backpacking around South America on a shoestring. This is bullshit.
The work isn't interesting
That placed me in the 95% majority. You're not golfing with CEOs, talking about strategy, then driving your Lambo home at 3.30 pm to have sex with your hot girlfriend. No, your sat at your computer, haven't spent more than 5 minutes in the sun in weeks, you are out of shape, have bad skin, are tired, and overworked, and your facing yet another office dinner before calling yourself a cab somewhere between 1 am and 5 am to take your lonely ass to your empty bed.
In those rare moments, you do get out your tie to go talk to a client, you're not having a nice interesting chat with an interesting person, you talking finance to some other depressed office drone in some corporate office, who either pretends to give a shit or, more often than not, doesn't pretend.
Of course, now and then, I did meet that rare breed who got their kicks from debt-restructuring or endless levels of back-solved pseudoscientific analysis, but this only depressed me as it reminded me how little I cared about this nonsense, and thus made me further question why I was spending every waking moment - and half the ones I should have been asleep - devoted to it.
You're never going to get as rich as the superstars you admire on the TV and watch in films
Even though I got paid well, I wasn't going out buying different coloured helicopters every weekend, rolling in designer threads, splashing £30k on a night out, and holidaying every other week in some exotic location whenever I could be bothered to charter my private jet. You'll be above average, but still pretty average. Sure, you can buy a MacBook Air without really thinking about it, and you can take taxis instead of the bus. But that's it.
I was amazed at how modestly people lived in banking given all the hype that surrounds it. They were just sad middle-class bland people, with unexciting lives, and unexciting prospects. A bunch of nerds who got caught up in a cage made of money and dreams and greed, and never got out. There had to be more to life than this.
Eventually, I thought - fuck this
I got to the point where I wasn't buying myself nice things anymore because doing so only reinforced my dependency on a job that I hated, a job that was taking over every aspect of my shortening life. I had worked hard at university to have a good life, a happy life, a 'successful' life.
And I wasn't finding it in IBD. And nobody above me was either. Even the 'baller' MDs were really just miserable, uninteresting, and often pathetic old farts. I didn't want to be them. I wanted to be a colourful, shiny person with love in my heart. Someone with passion, happiness, and laughter lines, someone who has taken life by the horns and lived on the edge, taken risks, had love and loss, and seen the world.
I made my plan to leave in baby steps
First I started interviewing at other city jobs - everything from hedge fund analyst to private equity analyst to an inter-dealer broker to insurance to wealth management to sales to trading and even equity research. These all looked boring, these all involved wasting away the majority of my life at a desk. These all involved long working hours, even if a little better. None of these lit the fire I once had before being crushed by banking. So I looked at jobs in corporates, in their M&A team, their finance team. Again, I went to a few interviews, got offers, but it was just the same shit. I didn't want to be a drone in a suit and tie. Fuck that Stephen, fuck that!
Eventually, I snapped
Despite being staffed up to my eyeballs, I left the office at 7 pm to prepare for an interview I had the next morning at 8.30 am. The AD I was working with (5 years my senior) consequently had to work until 5 am. The next morning, I wasn't at my desk at 8 am as I should have been. I was at my interview. Just another mind-numbing 'opportunity' to work in the debt refinancing team at Tesco's head office. Fuck that. I'd had enough. There was nothing for me in any spectrum of finance. I'd had enough.
I walked into work at 11 am, and by 11.01, the AD had dragged me into a side room to rip me a new asshole (she'd got a little cranky after 90 minutes of sleep and a lot of stress). She said that she was going to go and talk to our team head about this and stood up. I told her to sit her ass down, I'd do it for her. I walked over to his desk, and I respectfully told him I'd had enough. I thanked him for his time, he did the same, we shook hands, and I packed my shit together and sent my bye-bye email around the team.
Within 20 minutes of quitting, I was out of the front door. Bye-bye Blackberry, bye-bye security pass, bye-bye banking. The sun has never shone so bright, the air has never tasted so sweet, I have never felt lighter, than that moment. I was free. I was free. I was so fucking free I could taste it!
Now, oddly, I chose this moment to go to a shopping centre (long story) with a friend. Upon walking around in a slight state of shock I saw a piano in a suit shop, and this was exactly what I needed. To play a little tune and unwind. I didn't even ask if I could play, I just went in and started playing. A man quickly came up to me, paid me a compliment, and then asked me what I did. I responded 'I'm a musician' (why not?!). He asked how much? I said £100 for 2 hours. He hired me 5 days a week. Just like that, I'd become a musician, working around a ninth of the hours for about the same money.
Stephen Ridley at the piano - 23 years old.
Now I'm going to speed up the story a little. I quit this in a couple of weeks because I realised I didn't want to be a background musician in a shop, I wanted to be in the limelight. I wanted to entertain the world. I wanted to try and make it in music. I rolled a piano onto one of the busiest streets in London, and I started playing.
Within 1 month I had 9 management contract offers and had started recording my first album. It's now been 6 months. I've traveled around the world, I've got an album on iTunes, named 'Butterfly In A Hurricane'. Butterfly in a Hurricane by Stephen Ridley on Apple Music
South Bank, London.
I've played to literally tens of thousands of people. I've felt all the love and beauty of the world. I've laughed until I've cried. I've enjoyed more female attention than I thought a guy with my face could get! This is the most alive I've ever felt.
I used to do something I hated all day every day, I used to hate myself for doing that. I was bad company around people and nobody really liked me. Now I do something that I love, that makes me bubble with excitement daily. In return for doing the thing I love the most, people are made happy, people are overwhelmingly kind to me, people open their hearts to me, and I do the same to them. I roll my piano around the world sharing this love that grows inside in the soil of my happiness and fulfillment. I never ever thought I'd be this happy.
Okay, I can't afford the Prada suit right now, but I can't wait to wake up tomorrow, I've got a singing lesson in the morning and I'm meeting Coca-Cola in the afternoon to talk about being in an advert for them. My future is unpredictable (which I love), but I know that it will be fine because I'm the one in control. I spent 23 years developing my brain, and now I'm using it.
I just wanted to reach out to all those people who are in banking and miserable but too scared to leave, I want to reach out to all the nerdy kids with great CVs who want to go into banking, I want to reach out to everyone who has got this far reading and I'm telling you to take a leap and do something you love.
You might not know what that is, but you sure as hell aren't going to find it sitting unhappily at your desk trying to multitask all day long. You only progress by taking a leap of faith, not in God necessarily, but in yourself. Know that you have all the tools within you already. You can do and be whoever you want to be, and you deserve to be so much more than a tired suit in an office. Of course, if that's where you get real happiness, then that's fantastic. I'm just saying that wasn't my experience, nor was it for the majority of those I met.
Life is short - you're young, you're old, you're dead. React to that knowledge. You have nothing to lose!
With all my love,
Stephen Ridley
In the interests of proof (and self-promotion), here are the links to some YouTube videos and my social.